A few months ago, we saw a clip of a cop in Grand Theft Auto V losing his shit when Franklin, a black character in the game, simply approached him in a nonthreatening manner. The cop quickly pulled out his gun and, for no apparent reason, he offed him. Just straight up unloaded bullets. Kinda…sorta…seems racist or psychotic, no?
Yes.
Rockstar games, however, has denied claims that they baked racial profiling into their games, telling Buzzfeed, “This is absolutely false, the in-game police don’t treat one lead character any differently from the others.”
Okay, sure. If you say so, Rockstar.
As you’ll see in the video above, Rockstar’s claims were put to the test. And during two of the three tests, Franklin wasn’t treated differently from the other characters. Then, the testers took all three of the game’s characters to the South Los Santos police station and had them simply approach police officers. South Los Santos is the predominantly black population, economically depressed area in the game, and the results from that test were not in Franklin’s favor. Of the five times the testers had him approach the officers, he was harassed every time and murdered twice. MURDERED TWICE! Yeah…that’s not a favorable outcome at all.
[H/T Kotaku]